While certainly not Apple exclusive, I think it’s a mistake to omit that the majority of the attendees have an Apple development background. SecondConf itself has inspirations from previous local Apple-oriented conferences: C4 and, previous to that, MacHack. I myself was a sporadic attendee of both C4 and MacHack and this was my second SecondConf of the three they’ve had.

While “going indie” could accurately describe the overall feeling of previous years, this year’s SecondConf felt more centered around creativity. Additionally, many sessions broke from the traditional programming and business topics to cover hardware development and electronic music.

A full session list can be found on the SecondConf website and, while I enjoyed a lot of the talks, I must limit my coverage to a few favorites.

Robots!

I’m not much of a hardware guy, but Erin Kennedy’s talk was really fun and inspirational. Erin is probably the most humble person I’ve met, and the stuff she is doing with her RoboBirds is really impressive. I hear she’s working on construction kits and may even have a Kickstarter project soon. Follow her on Twitter or sign up for her mailing list to learn more.

Blitz Talks

A blitz or lightning talk format is 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with software that automates the presentation.

Creating Custom Bounce Animations with Math!

Securing Your Customers’ Privacy

I can honestly say from my own experiences that doing blitz talks are almost harder than full 45 minute sessions. The above two sessions by Soroush and Aijaz were really well done. In fact, they hit a great sweet spot by taking their limited time to explain a problem, outline the current solution, and then provide alternative solutions with realcode that people can use today.

Photos

I didn’t take too many pictures, but these fine people have shared a few.